Field of the Invention
This invention relates to service offerings and more particularly relates to customizable service offerings.
Description of the Related Art
Service offerings are in great demand in modern business. These service offerings include IT infrastructure, middleware, or business applications deployed to a variety of hardware components. Packaging these service offerings to meet the needs of a particular customer is typically a labor-intensive process involving manual assembly and configuration of various components by an expensive expert.
Configuration of the service offering also requires this low-level intervention, involving significant expense and delay. In addition, events requiring re-provisioning of the service offering, such as a failure to maintain service level agreement (SLA) requirements, can result in significant expense and delay while a technician re-assembles the service offering in an attempt to change the hardware and software resources assigned to the service offering.
Packaging and managing these offerings and making them available for ordering is a static process. As a result, ordering service offerings can be too rigid and slow to accommodate today's speedy on-demand business dynamics.